Category: News

Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran gave a talk in March on how some startling syndromes tell us about how the normal brain works. It’s just been put online and is available as a wonderfully produced video lecture.

To be perfectly honest, Ramachandran largely trots out the same stuff he talked about in his 1999 book Phantoms in the Brain (ISBN 1857028953) and covered in his 2003 BBC Reith lectures.

If you’ve not encountered any of these before, check the video, as he’s a brilliant and engaging speaker and you will thoroughly enjoy the journey.

My only slight niggles (apart from the repetition) are his suggesting that the Capgras delusion is rare, when in fact it’s relatively common in psychosis linked to dementia, and suggesting that the ‘textbooks’ give a Freudian account, when these were uncommon even before the now-standard explanation – based on a disruption to face recognition processes in the brain.

Link to TED Ramachandran lecture.

I’ve just found this on the announcements for the Wellcome Trust’s Small Arts Awards grant scheme. It’s a proposed art / science project that combines neurology, computational modelling, robots and punk rock!

“Neurotic” by Fiddian Warman

Neurotic questions the neurology associated with the essential human experience of pleasure, learning, taste and aging in the context of the instinct to dance. The project, which involves a collaboration between a neurologist, a computational biologist, punk musicians and a robotics artist, culminates in a live performance at the ICA. Punk band Neurotic will play to an audience of both humans and a group of robots whose cognition is modelled on brain function. The human-sized robots will ‘pogo’ alongside the human audience when their neural networks, modelled on real neural pathways, are appropriately stimulated by the music. The event will be accompanied by discussions on the role of memory, emotion and cultural context in the development of taste in humans and a website which explores neuroscientific issues raised by the research and performance.

Rock on! I can’t wait to see it completed. The full list includes many more innovative art / science collaborations.

Link to full list of Wellcome Trust Small Arts Awards funded projects list.

Full disclosure: I’ve been involved in Wellcome funded art / science projects and am an occasional grant reviewer for the scheme.

ABC Radio National’s ever-excellent radio programme All in the Mind has just launched a blog.

It has the latest on issues arising from the programme as well as other interesting snippets from the world of psychology and neuroscience.

The blog will also clue us into forthcoming editions, and there’s also a chance for you to comment, discuss and suggest ideas on anything that comes to mind.

And there’s even a scan of Natasha Mitchell’s brain. What more could you ask for?

As for the programme itself, tomorrow’s edition will feature Steven Pinker discussing ideas from his latest book.

Link to ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind blog.

Jonah Lehrer is a neuroscientist, blogger, editor and now author of a new book on what neuroscience can learn from art and literature. Wired has a brief Q&A with him, where he discusses Virginia Woolf, cognitive science and Kanye West.

Actually, this just serves as a brief introduction to some of Lehrer’s thoughts, as he’s promised to talk to Mind Hacks in more detail about art, the cutting edge of brain research and his new book Proust was a Neuroscientist.

We’ll post the interview shortly, but in the meantime Wired has a brief introduction to some of the key ideas.

Link to Wired Q&A with Jonah Lehrer.

Two important new cognitive science resources have just been launched: Online Papers on Consciousness is a huge database of full-text papers and articles on consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and MindPapers is a much larger index that contains entries for both open and closed access work.

The impressive project has been a joint venture between two tech-savvy philosophers: David Bourget, who is both a computer scientist and a philosopher of mind, and David Chalmers, who has been a beacon of philosophy information on the net for many years, alongside his notable achievements in consciousness studies.

The site also uses an interesting mechanism to classify papers:

…entries are categorized along two dimensions. First, all newly harvested entries are evaluated for their relevance to MindPapers. Second, those entries which have a sufficiently high likelihood of being relevant are assigned categories from the directory. Both of these steps make use of a specially developed Bayesian categorization program. In a nutshell, this program assigns probabilities to entry-category pairs based on heuristics and statistics drawn from training sets. The training set for the first categorization step was derived from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy… The training set for the second categorization stage is MindPapers itself.

It’s a lovely computational approach to making sense of huge amounts of work in this area. Perhaps this is the birth of a new field – computational philosophy?

Either way, both sites are going to be hugely valuable resources for philosophy and cognitive science alike.

Bravo!

Link to Online Papers on Consciousness (thanks Katerina!).
Link to MindPapers.
Link to more from Neurophilosophy.

The BPS Research Digest has discussed a recent study that analysed recordings of parapsychology experiments and has found that some of the positive findings may be due to experimenters unconsciously prompting the participants as they gave their answers.

The experiments used the Ganzfeld technique where one participant has diffuse white light and auditory noise played to them, effectively blocking the key senses, while another tries to ‘send’ images to them through mental projection.

Afterwards, the ‘receiver’ tells the experimenter what images came to mind and the research team see if it matches what the ‘sender’ was trying to transmit.

Taken as a whole, these sorts of experiments show a weak but positive evidence for extra-sensory perception (ESP), but it’s not clear whether this isn’t just due to a tendency for some negative trials not being reported.

In this new study, psychologist Robin Woofit analysed the tapes of Ganzfeld experiments from the mid-1990s and found that experimenters were more likely to respond decisively to correct responses but give subtle cues (such as saying ‘mm hm’) to give more information when the response wasn’t initially accurate.

This suggests that some of the positive findings may be due to this subtle prompting which is known as the Clever Hans effect, after a horse who was thought to be able to do amazing calculations, until it was later discovered that he was simply clopping his hoof until his trainer responded in a positive way.

However, this also highlights another aspects of parapsychology – they do some of the most thorough experiments in psychology.

This new study was only possible because the researchers keep archived audio recordings of every experimental session, something that almost never happens for other psychology studies.

It could be that other experimental findings in psychology are influenced by the Clever Hans effect, but we’ll never know, because few labs keep such thorough records.

Try asking for the audio recordings of decade-old experimental sessions from other areas of psychology if you’re not convinced.

It sometimes strikes me as ironic that some scientists consider academic parapsychologists to be unscientific when they do often some of the most carefully designed studies in the literature.

The fact that these studies typically find no evidence of ESP doesn’t mean they’re not doing science, and in fact, they’re provided some of the best evidence against airy fairy notions of ‘psychic powers’.

UPDATE: This is an important clarification on the study from Christian, which puts a different spin on it:

The observed interaction effect occurred during the review phase, where the researcher goes through the images the receiver spoke out loud earlier as the the ‘sender’ watched the video clip. This is prior to the receiver’s attempt to choose the correct video clip from a few distractors.

The review generally follows the pattern of the researcher saying ‘you said you saw x’, the receiver say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or maybe elaborates. It was those times the receiver elaborated, that experimenters appeared to have an influence – if they said ‘okay’ and moved onto the next item, then that was that, but if they went ‘hmm mm’ with an enquiring tone, then the receiver tended to ramble on a bit more and lose confidence in their imagery.

I don’t think it is clear that this would make positive results more likely, and could even make a negative result more likely. Remember too that these were double blind experiments, so it is not a case of the experimenters directing the receivers towards the correct imagery. It is possible though that a sceptical researcher could be more prone to the ‘hmm mm’ noises, and therefore would make their receivers less confident.

Link to BPSRD on parapsychology and suggestion.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

The scientifically accurate molecular jewellery store Made With Molecules has produced this wonderfully alluring endorphin necklace.

The necklace accurately depicts the structure of human beta-endorphin and is wrought in silver to adorn someone who will undoubtedly make you feel as good as the opioid brain chemical itself.

It is handmade by biochemist turned artisan Dr Raven Hanna, and contains each of the 31 amino acids as separate links in the chain.

You’ll notice it has a price tag to match the quality of the craftsmanship, so is strictly for the most glamorous occasions.

Link to Made With Molecules endorphin necklace.

The BBC have announced a new series which will investigate the scientific basis of three ‘alternative therapies’: reflexology, hypnosis and meditation – except that two of them, hypnosis and meditation, are well-supported scientifically validated treatments.

In fact, systematic reviews have found hypnosis to be an effective treatment for reducing nausea and vomiting during chemotherapy, distress during childbirth, irritable bowel syndrome, and needle pain in children, to name but a few. That’s not counting the numerous studies on the cognitive neuroscience of hypnosis and hypnotisability.

Similarly, mindfulness meditation-based therapies have been researched extensively and found to be useful in a large number of conditions.

In fact, they are one of the best treatments to prevent relapse in people who have already had several depressive episodes in the past.

Both hypnosis and mindfulness-based therapy are used in Britain’s National Health Service and the Royal Society of Medicine has its own dedicated hypnosis section.

Although it’s probably true to say that meditation and hypnosis are also used inappropriately by quacks, so are vitamins, painkillers and exercise, none of which are thought of as ‘alternative’.

The measure of a treatment is not only what it does, but what it’s used for. Antibiotics aren’t an alternative therapy unless you’re trying to use them to cure cancer.

Presumably, the BBC’s next series on alternative music will feature The Rolling Stones and U2 (in contrast, I’m guessing reflexology is the Menswear of medicine).

Link to odd BBC programme announcement.

Wired News has a brief article on how ageing affects the brain and what are the current best-supported practices to keep our mental edge as we progress into our senior years.

The article discusses ways in which the brain overcomes the natural decline in function and how this process can be supported.

Despite the current interest in ‘brain training’, which in its current version seems to have a moderate effect at best, the most effective technique seems to be physical exercise (although a combination of both may well be the best option of course).

Exercise is known both to boost mood and maintain the blood supply network to the brain, both of which are known to be crucial to mental functioning.

What’s the advice for now?

Physical exercise is the best-proven prescription so far, the scientists agreed. Memory improved when 72-year-olds started a walking program three days a week, and sophisticated scans showed their brains’ activity patterns started resembling those of younger people.

Then there’s the “use-it-or-lose-it” theory, that people with higher education, more challenging occupations and enriched social lives build more cognitive reserve than couch potatoes.

It’s never too late to start building up that reserve, said Columbia University neuroscientist Yaakov Stern. But, “the question is how. What is the recipe?”

Everything from doing crossword puzzles to various computer-based brain-training programs has been touted, but nothing is yet proven to work. Johns Hopkins University has a major government-funded study under way called the “Experience Corps,” where older adults volunteer to tutor school students 15 hours a week, to see if such long-term stimulation maintains the elders’ brains.

What about medication? Companies have been reluctant to test side effect-prone drugs in an otherwise healthy aging brain, but scientists cited animal studies suggesting low-dose estrogen and drugs that might mimic or ramp up brain signaling are promising possibilities.

Link to Wired article ‘Doctors Discuss Theories on Aging Brains’.

New Scientist has an article and video interviews with several transhumanists who are attempting to make the human brain immortal by reversing neural ageing, implanting stem cells and uploading the mind to a computer.

Transhumanism is a movement that aims to enhance the limits of human capabilities through techology.

The ideas stretche from the reasonable and shortly to be possible, to the outlandish and barely conceivable.

Unlike some other slightly left-field movements, it’s got some heavy-weight scientists attached to it. This means it’s rarely dull and at the very least it’s thought-provoking, even when it does stretch to the outer limits of sci-fi philosophy.

The New Scientist article discusses the possibilities of escaping death by developing the cutting edge of biotech.

Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal. This may not be possible yet, the transhumanists reason, but as long as they live long enough – a few decades perhaps – the technology will surely catch up.

To many, these ideas sound seriously scary, and transhumanists have been attacked for jeopardising the future of humanity. What if they ended up creating a race of elite superhumans bent on enslaving the unmodified masses, or unwittingly programmed an army of self-replicating nanobots that would turn us all into grey goo? In 2004, political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the world’s “most dangerous idea”.

If you think these fears are unreasonable, have a look at some of the Marvin Minsky quotes later in the article. He obviously wants to be robot overlord when SkyNet becomes sentient.

Link to New Scientist article ‘The plan for eternal life’.
Link to video interview with Sandberg, de Grey and Bostrom.

Last weekend, a group of mental health professionals took part in a study as part of the art science collaboration Walking Here and There. It’s a joint effort between myself and artist Simon Pope, and like earlier stages of the project, it questions how we use art and science to construct meaning out of memory, location and psychosis.

The study looked at the influence of recall on walking behaviour, drawing on an existing paradigm in psychosis research.

But the experiment was also designed to give the participants an experience common to psychiatric inpatients: feeling disoriented, having their experience of the hospital affected by their memories of being outside, and being experimented on.

The experiment was designed, reviewed and ethically approved, with the scientific aim of looking at how walking is affected by recall via differences in hemispheric activation.

Participants were asked to walk a route around Ruskin Park, a tranquil green area near to the Maudsley Hospital which inpatients often visit on breaks from the ward. Later, while blindfolded and earplugged, participants were asked to recall aloud their stroll around the park while attempting to keep to a midline in a basement corridor of the hospital.

A similar approach has found that people with higher levels of schizotypy (subclinical psychosis-like experiences) and people given the dopamine boosting drug L-DOPA, are more likely to veer to the left on this task, reflecting increased right hemisphere activation.

Recall is known to preferentially activate the right hemisphere, so we might expect greater left veering during the task.

However, the study was located both to communicate some of the subjective experience of psychiatric inpatients to Maudsley staff, and also as a commentary on mental health care, as patients often find their time in the park more therapeutic than the disorienting environment of the hospital.

By doing this, we’re also attempting to question whether experiments can be meaningful beyond their data.

Occasionally, the sheer existence of a study has profound implications for society. Experiments such as Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment or Milgram’s conformity experiment were landmarks in reforming the ethics of participation owing to the subjective experience of the participants and their attempt to study the extremes of human behaviour.

With the increased ethical scrutiny into research, perhaps experiments are now only valued for their data, and participants only for their behaviour.

An earlier phase of the project, Gallery Space Recall, was a gallery exhibition without any objects. Visitors, largely artists and art curators, were asked to recall, while walking through the gallery, their experience of an earlier exhibition.

And while the walking experiment was designed to comment on mental health care, one of the main themes for Simon was that Gallery Space Recall critiqued the art world and its obsession with saleable objects and the prestige of gallery spaces.

But in terms of the experience, the gallery visitors were asked to value their subjective experience as a key component in the piece, rather than relying on any objective aspects of an artwork.

In the walking experiment, we attempted to do something similar, but rather than attempting to highlight the role of subjective experience in art, we focused on the subjective aspects of science.

We’re debating what to do with the experimental data, and we think we might bury it – to create an exhibition without objects and an experiment without data.

Link to Walking Here and There.

The New York Times reports on a study shortly to be published in Nature Medicine that has developed a blood test that can predict the development of Alzheimer’s disease with 90% accuracy.

One of the difficulties with Alzheimer’s disease, and indeed most forms of dementia, is that by the time the characteristic mental difficulties are noted, the disease has already been affecting the brain for some time.

It would be useful if these changes could be detected way before they started to affect memory, attention and so on, so the clinical team can intervene as soon as possible.

To this end, the researchers looked at the levels of various proteins in the blood of a number of older people who had ‘mild cognitive impairment‘ – detectable but relatively slight mental difficulties for their age.

Each participant was followed up so the team knew whether these initial cognitive difficulties developed into Alzheimer’s disease or not.

A statistical analysis looked at which of 120 proteins most distinguished the two groups and a group of 18 key proteins were identified which could be used to diagnose the groups with 90% accuracy.

Interestingly, the protein analysis suggested that Alzheimer’s may be linked to problems with inflammation, blood growth, neuroprotection, neural growth, waste cell removal and energy regulation.

The clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is based on mental difficulties and possible brain scan evidence. However, it can’t be diagnosed for certain until the brain is examined after the person has died.

In this case, an additional important step was completed by examining some of the post-mortem brains to confirm the diagnosis and, reassuringly, the blood test retained its accuracy.

It seems that this test is only useful in picking up people who are already developing the disorder but don’t show any symptoms yet, so it can’t be used on young people to determine who will develop the disorder later in life.

Link to NYT article ‘Progress Cited in Alzheimer‚Äôs Diagnosis’.
Link to write-up from Nature News.
Link to abstract of scientific study.

Neurophilosophy has found some fantastic footage of someone controlling their Second Life avatar using a brain-computer interface developed by the Biomedical Engineering Lab from Keio University in Japan.

From watching the video, navigation is certainly quite possible, if not a little awkward. One of the striking things is that the person cannot seem to be able to easily move forward and change direction at the same time.

Presumably, this is quite a tricky problem for a brain-computer interface (BCI), as they work by converting electrical patterns from the brain into keyboard responses.

While your average Halo player will be able to combine key presses to maybe move, change direction, shoot and lock at the same time, it’s difficult both for the BCI to learn to distinguish each of these commands, as well as for the person to train themselves to think in the ‘right way’ so the brain generates distinct enough patterns for each combination.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see quite how far the technology has gone. A fairly simply rig now allows control within a consumer environment.

Not quite The Matrix but still a useful development for a technology that might seriously benefit people with paralysis.

Link to Neurophilosophy with brain-computer interface / Second Life footage.

ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind has a powerful and timely edition on the psychology of living under the military regime in Burma.

Particularly interesting is the interview with Dr Monique Skidmore, an anthropologist who has spent many years researching the effect of the attempts by the state to control the people, body and mind, on day-to-day living in the country.

This is interesting as most work on propaganda attempts to understand whether it is effective. In other words, how successful it is in ‘manufacturing consent’.

However, Skidmore’s work has looked at how people maintain a sense of freedom under such an oppressive regime when perhaps the only thing they can trust is their own minds. For example, by cherishing benign but subversive secrets as a form of mental independence.

She has also looked on how this interacts with mental illness and reports some fascinating examples where psychopathology seems to be expressed as expressing rebellion against state censorship.

I started by working at the Yangon Psychiatric Hospital because I was interested in how people saw their own illnesses. But the interviews started talking about all kinds of magical imagery and religious imagery. And particularly amongst schizophrenics, there was a sense that when they heard voices coming through the radio that these were interviews with senior people in the political headlines — so they were either military leaders, they were drug lords, or they were leaders of opposition parties such as Aung San Suu Kyi. And I began to see that in the minds of people who were suffering a mental illness that there was a dialogue that wasn’t allowed to be spoken out on the street but that was prevalent in people’s minds.

The other is drug counsellor Pam Rogers who works with Burmese refugees in Thailand and notes that the desire for freedom plays a huge part in the motivation to beat addiction, as addiction is seen as another form of mental slavery.

It’s a fascinating look at the quite different mind set needed to understand how the immense psychological pressure of a totalitarian government affects its citizens.

Link to AITM on Burma: ‘I resist in my Mind only’.

Like The Stone Roses of the neuroscience world, Nature Neuroscience’s podcast department created a fantastic first release and then went tragically silent.

Now they’ve made a comeback with a brand new programme, and I’m told we are to expect regular podcasts for the foreseeable future.

The programmes are being made in collaboration with the respected neuroscience education charity, the Dana Foundation, and include discussions and interviews with scientists who have been responsible from some of the most exciting recent research.

The latest edition covers the use of key chill-pepper ingredient capsaicin as the basis of a pain killer, the military uses of neuroscience for soldier optimisation, and how learning is affected by stress.

A welcome return and a great comeback edition.

Link to Nature Neuroscience podcast.

The new edition of Scientific American Mind is on its way to the shelves and two of the feature articles are freely available online: one on the neuropsychology of mystical experience and the other on one person’s experience of false memories created by the widely discounted ‘recovered memory therapy’.

The article on the neuropsychology of mystical experience covers all the major research studies but has a few niggling omissions.

For example, it mentions that a 2005 attempt by Swedish scientists to replicate Persinger’s induced ‘sensed presence’ studies “failed”, without mentioning that it wasn’t a very good replication – as noted by Persinger himself in a reply in the same journal.

The whole area of neurotheology is interesting because its very presence seems to rile some people, not least because some of the researchers have personal religious beliefs. However, in the field as a whole the mix seems quite healthy.

For example, Beauregard argues in his new book that there is a neuroscientific case for the soul, from reading Newberg’s book Why We Believe What We Believe he seems to be of the ‘there may be something spiritual going on but I’m not sure’ school, whereas, as far as I know, Persinger and Ramachandran are both atheists.

I find Beauregard’s argument a bit bizarre to be honest, as understanding the neuroscience of spiritual experience tells us no more about the existence of the soul than the understanding of vision tells us about the existence of whatever someone’s looking at.

However, this doesn’t stop people using the data to confirm their own beliefs. The article finishes with a lovely example of this from both sides:

Moreover, no matter what neural correlates scientists may find, the results cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation of God’s interactions with them.

What these studies may show is that spiritual experience is distinct from other sorts of subjective mental states in terms of neurobiology, but they can’t answer metaphysical questions.

The other SciAmMind article discusses the science of memory with regards to one woman’s experience of having false memories of satanic ritual abuse raised by involvement with an unethical therapist.

Other feature articles include stories on Eric Kandell, virtual reality, brain nutrition, IQ and the Flynn Effect, unusual experiences and creativity, and the accuracy of visual perception.

Link to annoyingly titled article ‘Searching for God in the Brain’.
Link to article on false memories entitled ‘Brain Stains’.